John Calvin Brewster

The Ventura County Museum of History and Art will open an exhibit Saturday of photographs by John Calvin Brewster, a Ventura portraitist who established a studio on Main Street in 1875. The exhibit will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the museum, open Tuesdays through Saturdays, at 100 E. Main St.; 653-0323. In celebration of the opening, a lecture will be presented on Brewster's work at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Ramada Inn, 181 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura. A reception will follow from 5 to 7 p.m.

When John Calvin Brewster blew into town in 1874, Ventura's population was 600 souls, and photography was a brave new medium. Like other early photographers, Brewster no doubt felt himself on the cutting edge, leading him to make such brash statements in ads for his portrait studio as, "It is the only means by which youth and beauty can be truthfully preserved."

A big, eye-friendly show like "A Painter's Paradise: Artists and the California Landscape," now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, clearly aims to please, and it does. It's a perfect holiday art event, with no difficult aesthetic ideology to decipher, no controversy to dodge. All ages and sensibilities are invited to the party. It's a party with all the trimmings.

Ventura County is certainly not going to be mistaken for an artists' mecca. But the scene here is a surprisingly healthy one, especially for a region too often stereotyped and unfairly dismissed as a cultural backwater, lurking in the shadows of the metropolis to the south. The artist population here is solid, evolving and highly varied.

In looking at the developments and general texture of the Ventura County art scene in 1996, it seems as though it was a year when most of the action took place in out-of-the-way places. On a very basic level, the county's art scene is an out-of-the-way place. This is partly due to the geographical and social lay of the land in a county so spread out and multifaceted. Still, it's true that art watchers had to go out of their way to find art this year.

On an autumn day 125 years ago, photographer John Calvin Brewster climbed to the top of a scrubby hill above San Buenaventura Mission and did future historians a big favor. Pointing a bulky camera, he took a photograph of the pioneer town so precise that researchers still pore over it to glean information about a horse-and-buggy society that was about to undergo dramatic change.